Monday, March 12, 2012

That's how many words Word Dynamo estimates me to know. Now, I would argue that it's an artificially low estimate, since it doesn't include any Italian, German, French, or Japanese words. But despite its limited word list, the test is rather well-designed, as it keeps getting harder as you progress up the difficulty ramp.

Check it out and see how you do. And here is another benefit of homeschool. One of our elementary school age kids took the test and scored 20,090. Ender scored 43,814.

After correctly spelling "pickelhaube," "idiopathic" and "pharmacology," Elise Stahl of Greenfield won the seven-county metro-area regional spelling bee Saturday on the word "remand." In the 16th round, Elise, 12, outlasted Eva Beeman Trelstad, 10, of St. Paul and Benjamin Pults, 13, of Maplewood to represent Minnesota at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., in May.

Chalk one up for the Grizzlies! League sources were heard to say that Greenfield would be wise to consider turning the team's drafting responsibilities over to the young Miss Stahl.

11 Comments:

I see the comment format changed. I had 45,576. Quite proud of that, I was. I can add my 500 words of Spanish, which I have boasted that I've known since high school... and also about the 150 words of German shop language necessary to get my squad to knock out the T-34 coming down the alley...

It seems as if the testing system uses "tiers" of words and assigns you a semi-random score within the range of the tier. IE, every score about 50,000 is actually more or less identical. This would explain why some incorrect answers will still yield a positive amount of points ,but why some correct ones might yield a negative amount of points: as long as the difficulty rating you are assigned to remains unchanged, your score will still be randomly determined within that rank.

A casual look at the high score listing shows that someone managed to get a score in excess of 140,000. Apparently, you can only get a truly high score if you sign into the website. I'm assuming that doing so will allow you to save your score and repeatedly take tests, boosting the value higher as you progress upwards